Signing off.

On Wednesday we went to class and handed everything we had done for the project in. It was a good feeling. We worked really hard and I only hope our grades reflect that in a couple of weeks when we receive our feedback. I think ours was good enough to get us top marks but of course we are also marked individually. Our game didn't have super polished load up screens or main menu screens like we had planned, but the game itself was polished to a high standard and had six playable levels which wasn't bad considering we started building the levels with six weeks remaining.

We did it!

Personally, I feel I contributed enough to earn a high grade but we'll have to wait and see. I handled the vast majority of the design aspects of the game, including the documentation. I did enjoy having all that creative freedom but sometimes I would've liked someone to bounce ideas off, particularly with the level design.

I really enjoyed working with Lab Rat Games, and it's sad that Simon is leaving us. I learnt a lot about myself and how I fit into a development team. I hope a few of the guys want to stick together for next year's project, because we've formed a good working relationship and become good friends in the process. It's also a shame our tutor James Burton is leaving the course as well as Simon, although his feedback sometimes felt harsh, I learnt a lot about design with him as our tutor. It was also fun watching him play Dimension Hop and swear in Spanish whilst doing so. Who knows who we'll get as our design tutor for next year. We've had two great design tutors in Ben and James in the first and second years respectively that I just hope they can get me through my final year.

I'm excited/nervous about my grade but I'll push it to the back of my head for now as there's nothing left that can be done. For now, I'm going to stop worrying about everything and just enjoy my time off. I think for the next project, I want to work on a more serious story. Hopefully, there'll at least another designer in our group and I'll have more time to work on more areas of design. So this is me signing off until the end of September when I start my third and final year! I'll probably stick with this blog for my third year so I'll be back baby!

PEACE!

Judgement Day!

It's finally here. The final day of the project. It's giving me a mixture of emotions to be honest. In a way I'm relieved because this is the culmination of all of our hard work since the project started. It also means I can take a break and try and enjoy the rest of my summer in between working at my part-time job. I'm nervous because I'm not sure our game is ready. I know that if we had more time we could make it so much better but at the same time I know that we did the best with the time we had. I'm excited because I haven't seen a finished build of the game since Monday and I haven't seen it complete with the sound yet! I'm also a little sad because I've really enjoyed working on Dimension Hop and it marks the end for the team. One of our programmers is leaving the course once this is over. It'll be sad to see Simon go, especially because he was so important to our team. He constantly kept us organised throughout the whole project and who knows what would have happened to us if he hadn't done so! It's a shame I won't be able to work with him on next year's project but I wish him all the best for the future. Shame he won't be bringing us any more Cornettos either!

So, it's a big day for the team! We made substantial progress in the form of FINALLY getting the animations into the game. I was very impressed with Harry's work on them and of course Simon being able to get them to work seamlessly in the game. It's strange how just one thing can add so much polish to a project. It actually looks and feels like a real game now! I only have one small thing to do before 7 o'clock which shouldn't be an issue. I just hope we've done enough to get ourselves a decent grade. This will be my penultimate blog post for this year as I'll post again after we've handed everything in. I just hope everything goes to plan! Time to get ready and go and meet up with the guys! Wish me luck!

The looming deadline!

It's been a good while since my last blog post and there's a good reason why. We are quickly approaching our FINAL deadline. In just a few short days, we will be handing the latest build of Dimension Hop in for marking, whether it's ready or not. With plenty of work left to be done we have to make sure we make the game to the very highest standard that we can possibly achieve. It's been roughly five weeks since my last blog post and the presentation of our vertical slice. Our final sprint started straight after and I have to say, I think we've come a very long way.

Here is the Gannt chart that Simon made to show the tasks that needed to be completed during our final sprint (final 6 weeks) to get the game to an acceptable standard.

"Colour coded for your pleasure." - Simon Gilbert

So, as you can see, we have plenty to be getting on with. Building two levels a week whilst testing and making adjustments was very ambitious of us. However, we had already cut a lot of content out of the game and didn't want to cut any more. My job during this final six weeks has been to keep the level designs coming. I've also been in charge of bug testing the game, helping design the sound and completing the much-dreaded project handover report.

I'm on track to finish everything in time and I'm pretty happy with the level designs. After playing some of the completed levels whilst testing, I found them to be fun but not always in the way I meant them to be. It always feels so different when I play the builds to how I play it in my head or with movement markers in Photoshop. However, there are some things that I intended on going a certain way that also turned out pretty well, I'm happy with it. If we can polish the game to the standard we have envisioned then I think we'll have a pretty fun game.

The main problem I've had this past six weeks has been the testing. Our game is only compatible with an Xbox 360 controller as of yet and it's inconvenient when you want to get other people to play your game if they don't have one. I'm not sure that we'll get everything done but I'm certain that we'll have it completed to a respectable standard.

Here is the Gannt chart from three weeks into the final sprint. The green bars represent the percentage of the task that has been completed and the red is incomplete tasks.

You can appreciate from this how far behind the team was at this point but we soldier on regardless. I'm feeling quite stressed in regards to the impending deadline and I'll be relieved when we cross the finish line. It's been a long project and I have enjoyed every second of it but I fear that these last few days might be the death of me! So, until Monday! PEACE!

The Vertical Slice and Crunch Time

Since my last post the team have been tested in some ways and have hit what I personally feel is our lowest standard of work to be done for a deadline. When it came to the Vertical Slice, everything seemed to be on track. However, we made some mistakes and certain circumstances prevented us from reaching the high standards we always strive for.

First of all, we were without one of our programmers for a large amount of time in the last couple of weeks which left Simon with a lot of coding to do on his own. This was a huge factor, but could not be helped and it did set us back a bit. I feel partly responsible however because I had only given the team a paper design for my level when I should have given them a version that was on a grid and completely to scale etc. We had other issues such as the animations not being done properly in one project and they became mismatched when put into the game. Also, some of the art assets weren't the right size so Simon had to spend time editing them.

Overall, it was a collection of errors across the team that ultimately meant that we didn't have much of a level to show. I was disappointed because we have yet to show of any actual gameplay in terms of a full level with game challenges and obstacles. Our previous demo had shown off how to play and how to use the mechanics but there still isn't any challenge there. We showed them what we had and we threw together a quick presentation to show them that we have actually improved on a lot of aspects of the game but we just haven't had time to get them into a build of the game just yet. However, we are currently working hard with the time we have left to get our levels finished to a high standard. Unfortunately, this means we have had to cut a lot of the game out. We originally wanted the game to have 10 levels including 5 chapters of narrative telling Hop's story to the player. We have had to cut it to 5 levels plus a tutorial so that we can get it all finished. This means that we can only fit one of our storyboard/cutscenes into the game and there won't be any time to tell the whole story. Any narrative other than the opening storyboard is going to be transmitted to the player via in-game dialogue. This was a huge blow for me after writing the story but I know it's very necessary and to finish all of the work we had planned just isn't feasible anymore.

This feels like a very negative post but we knew that this wasn't going to be easy and we knew things would change the further we got into this project. We're all still learning and we have made some mistakes but we have learned a hell of a lot from the past few weeks. We have already moved past this and are fully focused on making Dimension Hop the best we can for that final deadline. We know we have something special with this game and now we're gonna make sure we do it justice.

Benny the Socktopus and the Big Fat Distinction.

On Monday, we received feedback on our Game Design Document. I couldn't make the lecture as I had tickets for a gig, which really sucked because the GDD was my responsibility. I wrote the majority of it and formatted the whole thing and you'll know how stressful it was if you read this blog often. Our design tutor James is notoriously hard to please and is an expert at poking holes in your documents and this was my first time writing a GDD. I was nervous about the feedback as I didn't want to let the guys down. We had some negative comments about the Pitch Document and I wanted to improve on that this time around.

The feedback turned out to be great, a lot better than I had expected. In our tutor's own words it was a 'Big Fat Distinction'. I was proud of the document and I knew I had done the best I could and the work the other guys did for it was also to a high standard. I think the main reason that the document was a success was due to the extensive planning I did before we started. I researched GDD's thoroughly and planned our own accordingly. See my other blog post 'Plans. Important plans.' for more details. I was pleased that I could contribute to the team and that as a group we got some praise for this as we've all been working hard. I just hope that we can continue to produce a high standard of work and that we can achieve that elusive Big Fat Distinction for the whole project!

Since reading our GDD, James has really started to buy into Dimension Hop's story and it's characters. In particular he loved Benny the Socktopus. To thank Benny, I'm gonna post his character profile here. You're making waves buddy! Soak it all up.

Character Profiles

Benny the Socktopus



Name: Benny
Age: ???
Height: 4ft 2”
Race: Socktopus
Background: Benny is a creature lost to the very darkest depths of the Void. He is an octopus made of socks that has forgotten the feel of love and companionship. Even so he remains positive… I think. It’s hard to tell when he wears a vacant smile at all times. The immense loneliness he has felt for so long with only the voice in his head for company has made him rather absent minded. He may not be much help to Hop as his incoherent babble may be hard to understand but a friendly face is still welcoming.

Personality: Benny used to be a loving and funny Socktopus. However, not much of this remains other than his pleasant smile. He has very much become one with the Void and is a shrewd representative of the despair the Void can bring to a being and reminds Hop that he only has a limited amount of time to find his way back home before he ends up the same way.

Hour of Fun

Last week, in our production lecture, we were introduced to a development technique known as the 'hour of fun'. It is basically an hour (usually 4 o'clock on a Friday when creativity is at its minimum) where all the members of the studio will stop working and start play testing their game(s). Someone will usually observe the team playing and make notes on anything that works or doesn't work. They will then sit, as a group, and discuss the game and give any feedback or share any problems they had whilst playing the game. This technique has been adopted by development studios around the world. Studios such as Tim Schafer's Double Fine Productions and, our Production and Design tutors, Ben Hill and James Burton's very own indie studio White Paper Games.

As a class we then had our very own hour of fun. There wasn't many members of each team that attended this particular class but it was still very useful. I was the member of the team that was observing and making notes and it was really interesting seeing people attempting to play our short and breakable tech demo. I got a lot of great feedback in particular from my tutor Ben, who's experience in the hour of fun was evident as he tried his hardest to break the game in every way imaginable.

All in all we got some great feedback from the rest of the group and some things to work on but it wasn't anything we didn't already know about before. The tech demo level shows off the mechanics great but isn't exactly representative of what a final level design will look or play like in the finished version of the game. However, I did find it very interesting to see other people play the game for the first time. I feel that this technique will be extremely useful when we have a more playable level with real challenges which we should do in a few weeks when our Vertical Slice is ready. It will be very interesting next time round.

Bye bye!

A Whole New Level of Dimension Hopping

This level is the seventh out of the ten that we are aiming to create for Dimension Hop. We are also using this level for the Vertical Slice we are producing to show off a high quality version of the game that is representative of the final product. I chose level 7 due to the fact that at this point in the game the player has control of all four dimensions for the first time. I wanted to show off how combining the dimensions and your abilities in each one can make for interesting and challenging gameplay and therefore a later level was the obvious choice. It also gave me the opportunity to show how challenging the game can be. I aimed for around 10 – 15 minutes gameplay, this could be longer if the player aims to collect all of the collectibles.



Here is the rough paper design I drew up to present to the rest of the team. I believe the design is fairly simple yet is an effective way of demonstrating the unique style of platforming we want to offer to the player. The player will have to mould themselves and the environment around themselves as they move through obstacles. Changing their properties and abilities as they do so. The player will also have to be fast and combine their abilities effectively.

It works nicely on paper but it will be interesting to see how it works in unity. Hopefully it will work well!

That's it for now!